NEAR Protocol Town Hall Aug 2022 - Web3 Gaming with NEAR

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:29

   hello everybody and welcome to this month's edition of our town hall this week uh we are joined by some incredible guests from the gaming industry in the world of blockchain i have lisa sturbikov from armored kingdom sasha podzillin i hope i'm saying that right sasha from uh the much-loved human guild and vivi lin from the octopus network so let's kick it off guys i think uh some

2. 0:54

   people often refer to gaming in blockchain as being the potential trojan horse for mass adoption because as we know gaming is a huge industry perhaps even bigger than hollywood right now so before we dive into that can you introduce yourself and the project that you represent my name is sasha i worked at near before from the very beginning from august of 2018 uh last year a lot of us split in different spin-offs um

3. 1:19

   from early team of near uh i started human guild together with some other people from early near we work with a lot of gaming founders virtual world founders gaming founders working with 50 or so games right now so that's a very short intro hi everyone um very nice to be here i'm vivi partner of octopus network so also a very brief introduction about ottawa's network it's near-based multi-chain network for launching and

4. 1:45

   running substrate-based evm compatible app chase so the idea is of of an app chain is to serve one application with one independent blockchain so unlike smart contracts evm compatible app chains allow developers to customize their applications in terms of governance structure economic design and underlying consensus algorithm and structure so in other words everything can be customized here and so since we're on the topic of gaming today just want to add that otterbox network evm compatible app

5. 2:17

   change dedicated transaction processing capacity allows it to achieve 1000 transactions every second uh with very fast finality so that means games built on dedicated app chains can process tens of millions of transactions per day to support blockchain games that reach millions of daily users so very happy to explore more later with all our fellow panel panelists and i am lisa sturbikov i'm mila kunis's producing partner so i'm

6. 2:46

   actually coming from the traditional hollywood side so as you said gaming a lot bigger business than hollywood um and we jumped into web 3 last year with stoner cats followed up with a project called the gimmicks and then really our um incredible labor of love is armor kingdom which is a multi multi-platform ip where it's gaming comic books and animation all of which feed each other meal and i are massive nerdy gamers have been for years children have gotten the

7. 3:16

   way of that but we still play a lot of games both tabletop and in video games and our goal our our desire for years has been to make a really great game so we're building a tcg right now and having a great time amazing thank you all so much let's just dive right into it um trying to put myself in in the position of somebody who's blockchain agnostic just for the purpose of this interview and as a gamer

8. 3:40

   what does blockchain offer the current gaming industry today yeah so i think it gives a lot of new things to both gamers and game developers so when you think about game developer it takes some adjustment to do you kind of give up certain control um at least how economists and games existed in web 2 world um is very different from how how they are operating in web 3 world developers used

9. 4:05

   to have like more control over the prices of items in their own game that they designed now it's all um open market but i think uh it it opens up the space for experimentation for developers it's similar to previous computing platforms like ios if you're if you're there in 2008 or building on top of facebook um in very early of that platform i think web 3 is similar in that for game developers including other developers it's an opportunity it's a

10. 4:32

    green field it's a new place where they can experiment and try things gaming is very competitive in in traditional platforms be it steam or mobile platforms or consoles and so a lot of things are figured out for the game developer in terms of user acquisition all of the best practices um for the web too but it's also very competitive and so the opposite is this new world where nothing is figured out it's super early we saw a couple of

11. 4:57

    v1s of web3 gaming but it's not as competitive if you deliver something compelling you get the attention yeah i think i totally agree with what sasha has said from the developers perspective so i want to add from the gamer's perspective i think that's really we're seeing a disruption um to the traditional or web 2 gaming because um you know like with the evidence of decentralization energies

12. 5:21

    and tokenomics that come with the blockchain so one of the most significant features um i think is ownership so blockchain really enables players to truly own their in-game tokens or assets so in traditional games for example players purchase digital items like skins etc but they they're not really owning them because the gaming platforms could could change the rules as they say fit and take away everything so um right now when game assets become end of

13. 5:52

    teens that's really a new level of assurance for the players um on their rights and also with the uh introduction of tokenomics and also the emergence of play to earn models etc we're really seeing a new um paradigm change um but also another like also in terms of interoperability and compulsibility um i know that is to take some time to really get there but because of the um decentralization and open source nature um i i think really blockchain

14. 6:24

    technology has the potential to allow gamers to interact across um various ecosystems yeah i totally agree with what everybody said um and as a gamer it feels to me like the blockchain allows us to do to mirror a real world experience the same way i played magic gathering for years i had physical cards those cards i could trade i could buy i could sell them you know they were a thing that i actually owned as opposed to owned an access to so if my kids are paying for at night

15. 6:54

    longer skin they can't sell it they can't even trade it like it but so the blockchain allows for a much more physical real world experience but in a digital format to me it's an it's a no-brainer as a consumer amazing and it's amazing to hear so many people here are gamers of course as you would expect with you being on the gaming panel so this is a bit of a curveball and i think it's a bit of a tough question but i'm super excited to hear answers

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    now if you dive into traditional gaming communities uh whether that's on twitter on reddit or discord i think we see a lot of pushback from them in regards to the integration of blockchain and nfts into games and a huge concern which often comes up is that you know this is going to solidify every single game as peer to win how do you think we can go about transforming that narrative

17. 7:41

    and is it even necessary yeah i think business models so to speak in gaming changed over time so uh before even mobile came around people were used to this particular model where they paid a lot of money up front then there was a big hype around free to play like roughly 15 years ago or so and then that one kind of like saturated at some point uh people started seeing that games became more exploitative

18. 8:04

    as opposed to how it was promised free to play so i i think we've seen kind of like something similar now with like play to earn there is a bit of a push back but new model is not figured out yet and so when people say pay to win i think we're dealing with the same game economy so to speak where some people have more time and some people have more money and so there will be some people who will be

19. 8:28

    playing the game um because they have more time and there'll be some people who'll be supporting the economy of the game through maybe through the money side of things so i think it's nothing new but like at the same time we're still figuring out this new model what does it mean like play to earn for example at human guild we're not big fans of uh play to earn i think too many things in crypto are tilted on the incentive side of things it started with like d5 summer

20. 8:51

    then nfts had something similar and i think we're trying to put founders back to focus on gameplay and like fun things and people pay for entertainment but i think the model itself is not fully figured out sasha has made a really interesting point because i think it takes time for people to adjust to new things right but um like from my own experience and also like from the gamer friends that i i talk to i think um i i

21. 9:18

    kind of understand how they feel because um the kind of resistance from traditional gamers um to embrace the blockchain games because um gameplay is so important right user experience and and to be honest a lot of those play to earn games are are just not so fun to um to play and basically just click and earn and and it really lacks the sophistication um of the traditional games and and and to be honest a lot of those people who play those play play-to-end games are not the

22. 9:51

    the same demographics that play the traditional games right so they really they don't they don't care if the games are interesting or you like that they're from triple a um games or the house how nicest graphics they just want to earn and they change the platforms um depending on the the yield that they get so um so back to how how do we have the mesa the mass adoption from the

23. 10:15

    mainstream um gamers i think user experience is really the key here and i think it's necessary to bridge the gap uh and tap into the mainstream use space of gaming so obviously um in order to make that to work we need to have the right infrastructure in place and you know we just can't imagine the transition to happen with all these conjectures and high guest fees uh from the blockchain so that's why i think it really makes a lot of sense for blockchain based games to have their own designated blockchain so that it could

24. 10:47

    um customize the functionality to give users um the best experience they have yeah i mean i think you know my husband was a gaming um journalist for years he did he hosted the activation podcast and so when i first started getting the space he was like blockchain is terrible it's terrible for games it's terrible for the environment it's terrible for everything and now he's completely reversed and some of it i think is just

25. 11:10

    misconceptions i think there's a ton of education to be done also there hasn't been a good product people will come when there's a good product the the pay to win thing is a concern and so as we're building we try to think and try to balance out like what can we tie to the player so how can we reward the player how can they become more powerful as opposed to just just the game pieces becoming more powerful so that is definitely a balance that we have to take but it was a balance that we were taking back in world of warcraft days when people were

26. 11:42

    buying gold on ebay so it is just a thing that we need to deal with it's a thing that we need to hedge for and we need to be making consumer products that are affordable not where somebody needs nine thousand dollars to buy enough pieces to play a game like that's that's never going to be adoptable um and then there's a ton of problems because there is a lot of fraud in the blockchain

27. 12:06

    and so making a place where people feel safe where they are protected um where they don't they won't get taken advantage of we have a long way to go and a lot to build for that so just off the back of that do you think that the next successful blockchain game or perhaps the first successful blockchain game will be delivered in a way where users don't even know they're using blockchain yeah i think so i definitely think so that

28. 12:31

    as we just discussed the usability bar is like really high in gaming and generally speaking in like uh in a web today so i think it has to be that blockchain is like almost like hidden there's still probably some wallet interaction that people have to do uh but maybe even that can be like abstracted away so we like i think near as a technology improved a bit on usability but it's not like

29. 12:56

    it's it's v1 or v2 of evolution when it comes to usability actually quick thing on that usability that nir has came from conversations with blockchain game studios so back in early 2018 when we were talking to game studios and teaching them scalability none of them actually were interested in this they were essentially saying that we need gamers first we're losing 199 people out of 200 on metamask alone

30. 13:20

    and then once we have gamers then we can actually talk about scaling so i think we're just so early is what i think when it comes to usability yeah i think that that's i i want to echo what lisa has said it's really like like i totally agree with also such as that we are still very early because like we were lacking the education when a lot of those people outside crypto when they hear about nfts and everything they have all this

31. 13:44

    image from the media saying like there's food of scams and then it's super volatile so we definitely education here and also yeah like the user experience we are not even come to the tech technology scalability yet when if you just give them a wallet and metamask and all that you will get them lost there already they don't want to come back so but once that is figured out obviously i think scalability user experience and

32. 14:10

    and performance and everything uh it it also the infrastructure has to be there and i really think that near is in a really good place because i think near is one of the you know like the layer one of the i would say best um layer one protocols out there with the best user experience and um so yeah yeah i totally agree i mean i i'm in web 3 and i game and every every web 3 game i've played the friction to start the game is infuriating

33. 14:42

    and we've got to get to the point where people can start the game with as much ease as they could start any sort of mobile or aaa game i mean we just need to get there it's going to be some time and in the meantime we can make some games i mean you know our art of goal our goal is that like what really needs to be on chain what really doesn't so can we get those parts of the goal of the game that are not on chain so smooth and so easy that when you then

34. 15:05

    jump into the the on-chain parts it's a lot smoother for for a consumer perfect so moving over to sort of the technical side of things now there's an estimated three billion plus people that play video games around the world now do you have any thoughts on the technical limitations that blockchain might meet when it comes to gaming yeah i think that's what uh lisa just mentioned it's uh about also thinking

35. 15:31

    about what goes on chain versus not uh i think uh though there will be particular class of games that will be on chain fully games but i think it's will be like most like idle games kind of like like very kind like simple things that you don't interact with a lot uh let's just say but i think uh gameplay will will stay largely off chain um economy will stay mostly on chain i think we're like very early on this um

36. 15:57

    and and so when it comes to all of the digital assets when it comes to items characters land things like that those things will stay on chain i think that's totally possible to do with blockchains of today kind of like the the scalability that uh like uh nier and some other um faster uh earlier ones uh afford but but i think it will be totally possible and we're like also i think by the time we hit more players i'm pretty sure there'll be like layer two's emerging on near similarly how we

37. 16:28

    have player twos on ethereum today so i think we're just like very early like the the biggest web 3 games today are 200 000 unique active wallets per week roughly and then near biggest game so far was 10 000. so like we're like so um so early uh that i think once we start heating those more limitations around scalability we'll see like layer choose emerge and we'll see like new technologies emerging as well to augment

38. 16:53

    um i just want to add i think um like like lisa and sasha said um to building a part um in a descent in a centralized server for example like off of chain like the traditional um gaming platform stage could be a solution and also i think processing data on the side chain like um um aces run is did and also like what at other person we're trying to um you know like strive to provide solution to this pain point as an infrastructure also like i

39. 17:25

    mentioned earlier being an app chain means um your application the gaming application for example in this case um could really enjoy the full stack of an app chain and you could customize everything and enjoy the exclusive use of the change processing capability so you don't need to compete with other applications and and guess is that by your own setting so um and an app chain has self sovereignty governed by your own community etc so i think in this way it

40. 17:55

    could also um help to ease that usability and user experience um pain point yeah these are people who are much smarter than me at this listen to what they just said and i think one more thing to mention about technical limitations i think nier is also working on removing some of the limitations so up until very recently um you cannot use like javascript um as a smart contract i think there was agoric one of the teams who who did it in in web3 before this senior is not the first one but i think it also is a big one for

41. 18:27

    gaming because there are a lot of um independent game developers smaller studios who prefer like something like javascript they're like tens of millions of people who know javascript today in the world there's a fraction of them who are like interested in gaming exploring web3 gaming and so i think that will bring um a lot more experimentation into the space so that's also cool i do think one of the other things that that um in addition to just sort of the

42. 18:53

    computing power there's also just the tooling so like there's no really great fiat on-ramp that is super smooth especially like in the united states we have a lot of regulations people are coming kind of really coming hard after crypto so until there's a really easy way for us to like exist in blockchain with fiat i think that th that friction's gonna be a problem yeah there's definitely a lot of hurdles that we we still need to overcome but i think we've touched on on quite a few of

43. 19:24

    these points already um but for those of you building on here which is of course everybody here today why did you choose nia in particular like so in our case we work with a couple dozen gaming founders on your native lanyard um main two things that come up is usability what we discussed briefly before uh near uh has really neat way how like onboarding is handled how transactions can be handled flexible key management system cryptography is obstructed away so those things are like really important for

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    game developers because after all they want to go after traditional game developers not a small group that exists today in web 3 gaming and then another piece is finality so i think uh finality being just a couple seconds allows people to build near real-time experiences on your another kind of finalities like let's say eight seconds ten seconds then you need to figure out essentially like what

45. 20:19

    the player will be doing while they're waiting for confirmation so i think those two things usability and finality is what like stands out for the founders at least that i'm working with okay um so for near for enterprise reasons and actually it's quite an easy um option for us because we really share a lot of synergies with near and um like near prioritizes youth experience and also like i said earlier we think that near is most probably the most user-friendly protocol out there and

46. 20:51

    also someone used to say um what ethereum has promised to to or plan to do near has already achieved them um so we really think that it's true near uses pool of state also to secure the network and um in prevent sharding to make transactions faster and low cost so um based on near october's and and our app chains in the outburst ecosystem could really enjoy the usability scalability affordability high performance and interoperability with other networks such as we can also connect with

47. 21:26

    ethereum wire rebel bridge and also connect with cosmos or polkadot with ibc so also on a personal note um our founder louis leo went meeting with uh the co-founder of near ilia in the early days and they really share a lot of visions in common and so like really the human factor right the trust and the teams and commit the communities and those were also like one of the most important reasons that we chose to build here and also we are very happy and grateful uh for our uh choice and we're

48. 21:58

    now working very closely with the near communities and and also all these skills around the world and um just keep building um in in this space yeah we had many of the same considerations we talked to kind of we looked into basically every chain and near just absolutely made sense for user like usability um environmental factors which were really important to us in our team um and exactly what what vivi just said was just the human factor

49. 22:28

    they're um they're grown-ups there yeah i hope so i mean we're not all grown-ups right i know i can see no no but like in the right way like listen i hope we all like we should all be ridiculous and try to like make insane ridiculous things and see if they work but but there but at the core there were people who who had the same sort of vision of mass adoption of really like mass consumer products not just sort of these

50. 22:54

    maxi sort of speculative very solid very solid people yeah absolutely i mean one thing that always stands out for me is is at nia everybody seems to understand that we're all on the same team right so it doesn't matter really you know what blockchain you used to build on though i do hope it's near um but we are all pushing for this open web world where we each have ownership over our data assets

51. 23:18

    our governance and of course our in-game assets right now or at least one day um but where do you guys see the world of blockchain powered gaming in say five years time i tend to think about it as like very like iterative experimental so like this year on nera at least is a year of more people like launching so by the end of the year we're going to have maybe like dozen two launches of different games and i think it will be like really good learnings for the community next year we can improve on that so we can

52. 23:50

    like see what worked what didn't work um how to increase retention i'm sure that will be an issue so i tend to think about it as like very iterative approach i don't think we're gonna have like huge blockbusters like even five years down the line but i think it will be like maybe like millions of people already playing blockchain games yeah i think really we are it's so hard to predict and and then we're still so early and i think we need to zoom out a

53. 24:15

    little bit and and also like i think that the gaming uh space is really going to go hand-in-hand with the blockchain uh kind of like the whole web 3 space and so like some peer comp some people i think compare it um right now to kind of the rise of the internet 25 years ago or the smart form adoption nearly 15 years ago so no matter what i think um i think i'm optimistic about um i think the future and probably not five years i

54. 24:46

    don't know i really sometimes i am i'm very i wish i have the crystal ball but i i don't i don't have enough kind of um information to say five years but i think i'm well i think i'm optimistic to see like for example the mass adoption um happening um i think it's it's a process and also like probably we're seeing more aaa games entering the space and we're seeing vcs actually crypto visits investing in triple a and gaming so i think um with that in in in in in

55. 25:19

    the action um we are i think in the in the process of bringing in uh more mainstream users and also the industry talents uh to to come to the space i think sasha mentioned this point that the the traditional gaming is already very highly competitive so i think a lot of um talents out there and and the visionaries and and they are moving to the webs the gaming space as well so um i think that's also a very optimistic sign yeah i mean if i think of early netflix

56. 25:51

    when you just used it to get dvds and then they made house of cards um which was with high level talent which was an incredible piece of art and it brought people in and i think if we make an incredible product i mean and by the way it still house of cards was not the ratings that everything what you know grey's anatomy was but it brought people in it got brought attention and it it's like started a streaming revolution so if we can make

57. 26:17

    our house of cards we can make our thing that is a consumer product that people enjoy and want to come and play it'll start and i think a lot of it in five years has to do with what does the us government say regulatory regarding everything with blockchain it's um very very unclear and we're all trying to do our best and act in the best way we can but there's a lot of lack of regulatory clarity on anything regarding blockchain assets perfect yeah i think that's a

58. 26:48

    particularly pertinent situation right now with what we've seen going on pretty recently so regulatory restrictions might be a factor which holds back the adoption of blockchain in the world of gaming what else do you think might contribute to that i think another thing uh crypto also tends to go in cycles there are like a lot of like bullet markets if if we're going into global recession

59. 27:14

    right now uh which seems like it's it's happening depending on the definition of recession then we might see maybe some period maybe a couple years of decreased interest it will just lead to like in previous bear market less people entering the space in a given months i would say last bear market was a lot harder like i remember like just getting started working on near and seeing that

60. 27:37

    there are only 30 developers three zero joining every month into the crypto space and then 95 of them go into ethereum so you're thinking about like okay like we have this one developer that all of the other chains will fight for every month that looks like very depressing i think now it's very different so you have like a couple hundred founders on um multiple chains but i think if we go on

61. 28:00

    into recession now i think it will also hold back a bit just because it will be like a bit less interest um in in a space for the next couple years but it also will bring like more quality and more people like missionaries like really believe in this as opposed to like hype something like related to like what bull markets bring us yeah i think already um sasha and lisa have already made all these good points and and i think user experience like we

62. 28:24

    mentioned and then um the regulatory risk and also the you know the awareness or education right so um i think that's pretty much it and we still have we're still at a really early stage and also obviously the crypto winter the the whole um recession in in the bigger environment uh doesn't help but but i think just like 2008 the financial crisis didn't kill innovation didn't kill internet or anything and i i think we've survived um the crypto winter and and builders are still building and i think

63. 29:02

    last time when we were talking to um marriott and and she said actually a lot of great projects are built uh during the bear market because you just shut down all the noise and then people who stay there really those people who believe in the the you know what what they're doing so um i think that is the uh the faith that we have yeah i think i actually look at the bear market with like a little bit of hope um i think the hype is dangerous i think it's dangerous for a regular person i think they come in they see the noise

64. 29:35

    they jump into a thing and they they really lose money and i don't want to be part of somebody losing money i want to be part of somebody coming in buying a product that they enjoy playing and not thinking about what the exit the the hype the like mooning all of that stuff is to me dangerous in the long run for re for a real person so i actually think the bear market can allow us to build real things that real people would want to participate in um

65. 30:05

    the other challenge i think coming back to what i think you were talking about your last question that gaming has that other projects don't is in gaming you also have to deal with gambling regulations because there is this asset that you can sell different countries every single country thinks of a game of skill versus a game of chance differently so you have to be really really careful as you're building a game to make sure that you're building on the right side of skill um to not be making you know

66. 30:36

    a lottery yeah that's really interesting because i think we've seen a huge can of worms being opened up especially around europe but with loot boxes and things um so the way that crypto approaches that and the way that founders and developers approach it it's gonna be really crucial um but i'm just gonna pick up on one thing that you mentioned there lisa you mentioned hype and now i have an opportunity to make my biggest plug of the panel which is

67. 30:59

    neocon this year it's back it's bigger than ever the 2000 plus attendees in lisbon portugal september 11th to the 14th and the whole overarching theme is about building beyond the hype so i would love to know if you guys are planning to attend if so what are your plans can you share any alpha leaks about what people can expect uh should they meet you there in lisbon in september yeah so last year uh for me personally new york was like hugely positive

68. 31:29

    experience i i tend to sometimes forget um kind of like not seeing things in offline world with covet and everything working with like hundreds of people um day in day out but not seeing them actually sometimes uh is challenging for me sometimes i think like are we doing enough like is there a progress and then you go to new york on and you're like oh okay like there is like an insane amount of builders and so like for me personally

69. 31:53

    like last uh last new york one was like hugely positive experience and unfortunately i was only there for three three days i had to go to other places in europe this time around i'm going for like a full week we will have gaming arcade as a part of new york one there will be up to 20 playable games that people can try so it will look like arcade but in reality people will just try things on mobile

70. 32:16

    phone try things on a pc or mac there for different games and i think it will be like really really fun um and then yeah there'll be like other activities such as like side events we're planning some we're planning to attend to some i think new york on this year will be a lot bigger like 10 times bigger than last year it feels like so i'm just like generally very very excited and spending majority of the

71. 32:39

    august actually preparing the games for the new york one okay yeah we are also definitely going um i think how can we miss this big party for the near family so ottawa has also sent a team to go and we are flying over around basically around the globe um we have like uh sheldon luanna going from the u.s and kelson flying from malaysia and i'm currently in china right now and i'm still sorting out the logistics i really wish i could i could make it uh but

72. 33:09

    besides you know um but our whole team besides being speakers for the neocon we'll also have a boost for other pers and we are planning to host site events our team is still working to sort out all the logistics because none of us are in lisbon and we don't have like local people there so um so we're still working to kind of sort out logistics but we would like to invite the app chains to share their stories and also the latest developments and also like

73. 33:40

    such as that you know i think what is important is to to really meet um each other unlike all these um partners and friends like sasha from the near family um face to face and also to really kind of feel this human connection um we also thinking about hosting a side event in a boat and um but still sorting it out so we announced all these details on our twitter when confirmed and all of you are invited and you know come and say hi then have a drink with us

74. 34:11

    i'm probably gonna get in trouble for saying things so let's go right um yes i will absolutely be there our team will absolutely be there um we're still discussing exactly what we're doing but what i will say that we're doing is the thing that we do that's a little that's different than i think anybody else really in the space is we tell a lot of stories and we bring a lot of entertainment so our goal is actually

75. 34:34

    to work with everybody there to create a story that we then turn into a thing so we want to the same way that you have like a hackathon think of it as like a story hackathon where we have master storytellers who are writers and writing writing professors and we all get together and talk about like the math of storytelling how you hack those pieces together and how we can work together and like tell a math

76. 34:59

    story with a group so that's what i'm so excited and then we're going to turn it into a comic book so it will exist in the real world you know we know that like that that our team's strength is creativity and story and like fun and so we want to bring that stuff to and while we're there we also will be looking for more team members perfect well you heard it here first right there's there's your biggest alpha leak of the panel uh lisa i would i would like to know a little bit more about that so can you so can you describe what the process will be if

77. 35:30

    you're allowed to is this almost like a like a crowd-sourced story so my my husband who also is writing armored kingdom he created the universe um he is an incredible writer a screenwriter emmy nominated he also teaches screenwriting at ucla and the reality is writing a story has math to it has specific act breaks it has specific points in it high points low points you know calls to action and we're going to like what he does it's really really fun he

78. 36:01

    builds like all right what's the genre of the story we want to tell and people can yell it out oh wait we want to tell romantic comedy in this world fantastic who's early character fantastic and then we literally will board it up put it on a night and like a big board and talk about all of those points along the way and create the story in an hour and then we'll take it back and write it and turn it into a comic book it's gonna be gonna be amazing sasha i can't wait to play on

79. 36:26

    those arcades uh vivi if you do get a boat that's going to be incredible but um just while we have a few minutes remaining i'd like to i'd like to swing it back around to to blockchain gaming um as we've all alluded to we've yet to see a major blockchain power game take off nothing in the realm of triple a's but if you had to guess when do you think that will occur and what sort of genre what type of game do you think will be the one to take the crown there like in our case in human guild i feel

80. 36:59

    like we have like wide range of uh genres so we have actions people building we have strategy games uh 2d platformers virtual worlds rpgs so i think it will be like something for everyone in terms of gamers like i tend to play like single-player rpg games so but but blockchain makes sense more for like multiplayer games i think so i think it will it will be something for everyone uh in terms of which one will take off first uh successfully in a big way i

81. 37:31

    don't know but i do agree with lisa that it's all about the quality of the product storytelling is a big part of this lore uh building like really cool world that people want to be part of i think is kind of like what will get us to to that adoption yeah i want to um a really echo with what sasha and um lisa had said um i think it really is hard to predict but at the end of the day it really boils

82. 37:55

    down to whether it's fun whether the you know like the storytelling and whether the game playing the experience and i think but if you zoom out a little bit um i think if we're talking about like kind of like an ideal scenario um as blockchain infrastructure matures and also crypto users increase by let's say several votes of magnitude and triple a games really prove their profitability and then we we do see crypto vcs are betting big

83. 38:26

    on triple a games so i think um i believe that with this trend a few world-class gaming studios probably will join hands with um the projects to um you know to to work in this direction and and and then i think more companies with the ability to make triple a games will will come will follow and come to the blockchain space yeah i hate predicting because you never know but i do say i think i think you know build a great game spend a ton of money on marketing

84. 38:59

    and um we're not there yet nobody's doing it yet but we're gonna have to do normie people marketing to get to to get to players and that includes twitch includes influencers it includes all of those those people i mean you know the second a gamer that everybody really cares about is saying that this game is awesome people try it people play it um but i think we're years away from making a game that is that easy

85. 39:29

    absolutely i think i think that's it's a really interesting point that you're sbb because you know you mentioned this idea of of aaa gaming companies already coming into the space and we've actually seen that already right i know that ubisoft have doubled down on their commitment to use nfts in future games despite the pushback that they got from their communities so just just to throw this one out there do you think that this next big blockchain

86. 39:54

    power game is going to come from somebody you know like ubisoft like rockstar like capcom like nintendo a huge player or do you think it's going to be an underdog somebody who's crypto native with an incredible team um who knows their way around blockchain and knows that they're around the gaming industry i personally uh i'm biased towards like underdogs and bottoms up in innovation so we saw it in previous iterations of

87. 40:18

    gaming and not not only gaming 2 for like take mobile for example there are new players emerging like supercell king.com and and you have like bigger players like electronic arts uh disney coming much later uh to the party i think there were like some acquisitions that happened like 10-15 years ago jinping out majority of them so i personally think that's kind of how it will evolve and then there will be a lot of interest in bigger game

88. 40:43

    studios um but i i think it's just very different medium um where like um it's open economy like essentially a very different kind of stakeholder relationship and incentives so i personally think it will be bottoms up like in previous cycles as well um i think it's so difficult to predict this um like it reminds me i think what stash's um answer reminds me of like this theory um innovators that the dilemma meaning like

89. 41:16

    really the big um innovation that sometimes cannot be born like from big companies and then and and so like i think it really has a lot it makes a lot of sense and so i think just like lisa used this example of house of cards for netflix i think what we need is a tipping point and i think we nobody knows where the tipping points uh will happen but i think it will happen but it

90. 41:38

    just like nobody can predict how how would it happen i think that's that's something that i could i probably can put like what i expect to happen in in the gaming as well like we don't know but somehow the tipping point would happen and then all of a sudden the mass adoption would like happen more easily yeah i think the challenge on the big gamer the big gaming company side is lawyers

91. 42:01

    and a child and their challenge of wanting to of allowing the community to have some feeling and sense of creative ownership and i think that's that's all throughout all of all of the blockchain to allow people to build on your game and i think that a lot of the bigger gaming companies are like they're afraid about brand damage and so i don't know they're ever going to build the biggest innovation at least to start so i love the idea that it come bottom up as well the problem with bottom up is money and

92. 42:33

    those big companies have a ton of it so they they can they can throw all that money at it so it's i think it's it's each side has their own challenge and it's you know we'll see who's first but i mean and going back to the house of cards analogy what netflix did at that point when you were developing there is they were like david venture make the show you want to make they gave it to the creatives they let them make what they wanted to make and they then they got out of the way and i

93. 42:58

    don't see the big companies getting out of the way and i do see the smaller the smaller people having creative innovations definitely well you know regardless of what happens it's going to be really really exciting to watch sasha did you want to add something though oh yeah just what lisa mentioned uh is uh i agree that on one hand bottoms up is likely how it's going to play out on the other hand the the marketing side of the building

94. 43:22

    awareness money side of it uh i think is like what majority of the teams i'm working with like today lacking so they're like heavily on that technology not so much on even understanding how to do go-to-market in addition to having resources to to do this in the first place so i think that's something that also should be said about this disadvantage that bottoms up also has perfect um

95. 43:47

    so the crypto ecosystem is super wide right there's tons of different um facets to it you could have gone through d5 to nfts to art culture to social goods but you guys picked gaming i think that's awesome but what inspired you to build what you're building and to pursue the avenues that you're pursuing like for us when human guilt started we were thinking more broadly than gaming we were thinking about different kinds

96. 44:13

    of creators when we started working with game developers it was actually very bottoms up it was independent game developers and those are very similar to kinds of creators we were working with before musicians artists those kinds of game developers like independent game developers they're more like creators than like businesses i think it's more creative on that front in our case so we started with creators

97. 44:39

    uh many kinds of creators i'm very passionate about uh changing the equation for the for the creators we swept three beats music industries extremely consolidate consolidated right same for art like internet exists for like 20 30 years but the how things are done is still largely offline so gaming is just another example of that but how we decided to double down on gaming is we saw a lot of organic

98. 45:05

    interest last summer uh roughly a year ago on paris on the first nft marketplace on near so there were roughly a dozen or so creators they were mostly artists they didn't have maybe game development skills but we saw this like very early attempts at creating trading card games and that's why we kind of started to look more into this and and doubling down we started going to uh game jumps

99. 45:28

    game jumps is kind of like hackathon but people create games instead and we started seeing more and more smaller game studios approaching us so we more and more as we started looking into this more and more we also became kind of like oh this is gaming go to guys on ear so it kind of became self-fulfilling professor to the extent afterwards okay so i think in in my case we are slightly different than uh what sasha

100. 45:51

     and and these have been doing like we are not completely uh gaming we're in infrastructure actually so like octopus network was built by our founder louis liu and two other co-founders mike and julian um i am i'm i'm a partner but i share the same vision which is to help web through applications to launch and grow faster because we believe that the industry and the space needs real

101. 46:15

     applications and real use cases and obviously gaming is a big part of it so like it's not just about issuing tokens and trading them speculating on them so we need and we want to build something real uh we want to help with the adoption so so this idea has really driven us to build and grow octopus network and also we have enterprise accelerator as well to empower and help web3 applications and startups to um to

102. 46:44

     really bootstrap app change and to make their journey smoother and also to help webs we happen faster you know we got into nfts to support art to support artists and um you know initially it was sonar cats it was a show we wanted to make and we figured we'd make it this way since nobody in the real world would make it make it with us um say the real world this is the real world um but in the normies sort of world they were they were not going to make this um and then very quickly we realized that there was such an incredible opportunity

103. 47:14

     to improve upon our normal experiences of consuming content making content playing games like the things that we really do as normal consumers that the blockchain had allowed us to improve on that on that experience as a consumer and so very quickly we were like well gaming is just it's just a no-brainer it just makes sense it absolutely fits like hands in a glove and so that's

104. 47:37

     where we went this way um and and you know we had already been working on armored kingdom in terms of a world build and in terms of storytelling and comic books and immediate and and it was initially designed as a toy product so you know that physical experience really easily mirrored into blockchain and then we were able to kind of grow from there perfect well thank you all so much for your insights i do have one final

105. 48:02

     question it's my favorite question of every panel every twitter spaces every interview that i ever do if there is anything that you guys want to shout out right now or you want to plug or you want to draw attention to it could be your favorite book your favorite yoga position your favorite author your mum your dad your brother your sister your cat your dog your projects or if you want to share

106. 48:25

     any alpha leagues please take the stage right now go ahead and do it well i think this time of the year i'm thinking about near con so people should go to new york on.org get their tickets uh please come come by see the ecosystem with your own eyes i think that's what i want to shout out oh my god sasha already taken my um okay so i think adding to that um go to neocon um and also uh check out octopus booth and

107. 48:56

     check out audible's twitter and follow us and and follow all our app chains that are building on other pers and um adwords accelerator actually the full the autumn bench is opening next week so we are basically training and supporting new startups web 3 startups and and so if you are building something and you want to get support come and check out adverts um accelerator as well absolutely come and say hi near khan let's hang out let's have a drink let's tell some stories

108. 49:27

     um the armored kingdom comics um the second issue is out right now go take a look you can read it without only the nft on the on on the website so armor kingdom.com go check it all out um additionally meal and i have a movie coming out this fall called lucky squirrel live on netflix speaking of netflix um please check that out and then um lastly this is just not anything that i that i'm part of at all y'all haven't

109. 49:52

     watched the bear on hulu i know europe it's hard to get hulu that show is amazing everybody watch the bear have a great time sometimes i just want to like support artists making something that nobody nobody makes shows like that right now it's awesome is it perhaps a little bit ironic that it's called the bear and we say the best things are built during a bear that's right and i mean it's the restaurant experience of building in a bear market exactly that it's fantastic awesome well sasha vivi lisa you've been incredible

110. 50:25

     guests thank you so much for being on this week's uh town hall we had an incredible time we learned so much about gaming in the blockchain ecosystem and i hope that each of you watching did as well if you want to learn more about these projects i'm sure you can reach out to their communities head to their websites do a little digging and you can learn a ton about each and every one of them but if you want to learn more in person do come to neocon this september

111. 50:48

     11th to 14th in lisbon you can get your tickets at neocon.org thank you so much and i hope to see you there you